One of the main problems for a consumer is oftentimes incompatibility of his equipment and the programs sought to be run. For instance, an individual may have a printer that is incompatible with the driver loaded to operate it. Typically the user calls an administrator who telephonically instructs the individual as to how to program his computer in order to make the printer work. This may involve downloading printer drivers or other software in a time consuming process in which the administrator must ask the user questions. The user, on the other hand, may be insufficiently knowledgeable to answer the administrator's questions, resulting in frustration on both the user's part and that of the administrator.
In an effort to minimize such frustrations systems, referred to herein as emulation systems, have been developed so that the administrator can "see" what is happening at the user's terminal.
In order to do this in the past remote control programs have been developed which capture the low level graphic calls and send them to the administrator's computer for display. At the administrator's side these low level graphic calls are utilized to provide the screen at the administrators side with an exact duplicate of the user's screen. Such a system is commercially available as model pcANYWHERE from Symantec of Cupertino, California. In this system the administrator can understand what is happening at the user's side and verbally instruct the user what to do.
One of the problems with prior emulation systems is that the screen refresh at the administrator's side is slow, or in general not optimized to the demographics of the network and the users machine. For instance, if the user has a relatively slow modem connected to the network but is utilizing a compression algorithm that emphasizes compression speed over efficiency, this would have a negative impact on the screen refresh rate. The result for the administrator is that the administrator would select or click on an icon and have to wait an inordinate amount of time for a response. The reason for such delays has to do with the demographics of the network and the two machines in that inappropriate compression algorithms are chosen.
In an effort to speed up the response of such systems, various techniques have been utilized. One of these techniques involves the use of low level drivers to capture graphics calls.
However, these drivers can make the system unstable and require much disk and RAM memory space. As a result, oftentimes the screen refresh is often corrupted when moving graphics are encountered and has a stilted appearance.
These artifacts are in general caused by the order in which the graphic calls are trapped, and the different levels of graphics calls which are available. These systems are also inferior in displaying bitmapped graphics and moving images. The largest problem with the above systems is that they can take as much as 10 megabytes of disk space on both sides, and require a reboot after installation before using.
In the prior systems there is another problem in that by relying on the graphics calls the images are taken in parts and are displayed on the administrator's side in unnatural fashion due to the arbitrary order in which the graphics calls are trapped. These systems have to wait for other applications to make graphics calls in order to know what to update and rely on the applications to make graphics calls known to the systems. If an application performs a graphics operation not known to the system, that information is not transferred over to the administrator.
As a result the image the administrator sees is incorrect, since the entire system is dependent on other applications to perform known operations with the operating system. For applications that perform operations that are unknown, the system ignores what could potentially be the problematic area.
Thus for the newer peripherals coupled to the user's computer, in the past the problem could be ignored since the administrators system could not see it.